For the toddler’s mom, Patrice, who isn’t due until August, listening to the life rhythm of her little one in utero never gets old.

“I’m a sucker for the kinds of things you keep forever,” explains Buller of Bear. “If my kid’s heartbeat is in it, I’m not shoving it in the closet.”

Remember Teddy Ruxpin - the most generic-looking of bears who read storybooks to kids? Well, now those kids’ kids are getting squeezable stuffed animals implanted with a heart-shaped recorder that plays the soothing lub-dub of their embryonic days.

“We’re dealing with both sides of the spectrum - life and death,” says Purusha Rivera, co-owner of My Baby’s Heartbeat Bear, which is headquartered (of course) in Bear.

Rivera, 38 and a mother of three, is referring to customers who purchase her heartbeat animals to spread the joy of childbirth or to mourn a stillbirth or miscarriage.

Recently featured on NBC’s “Today” show in a Mother’s Day gift idea segment, the five-year-old company generated about $1.1 million in sales last year, said Rivera, whose partner, Sheldon Thomas, is also her fiancé.

An experienced ultrasound technician who earned her degree from Delaware Technical Community College, Rivera hatched the idea after discovering an untapped market for recordable stuffed animals.

The resulting demand has surpassed her expectations. The older sister of an Elkton girl received a bear containing her sister’s heartbeat before brain surgery. The family of a heart transplant recipient recorded his heartbeat to give to the donor’s family. The mother of a deceased 8-year-old turned a recording of her child’s laugh into a snuggle-able keepsake. And a serviceman recorded a lullaby for his newborn before being deployed.

Buller, a fitness trainer, plans to hand down her boys’ heartbeat animals to her grandchildren. Already, she recruited the plush puppy for her baby’s gender reveal on social media.

But some academics and health professionals worry that the marketing push to document every aspect of your pregnancy could harm children in the long-run. The traditional baby book and bronze shoes have been replaced with full plaster belly casts, sonogram pendants and flesh-colored fetus molds complete with miniature blankies.

As more technology becomes available, ultrasounds are no longer intimate bonding moments over grainy black-and-white images. Nowadays, a gaggle of a dozen gather at 3-D and 4-D spa-like ultrasound studios called Stork Vision or The Prenatal Picture to watch babies kick, smile and yawn with Pixar realism.

Marketers are skilled at exploiting vulnerabilities, and pregnant women are a captive audience, according to psychologist and author Susan Linn, who founded the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Now that the market for children is basically saturated, she added, companies have moved on to fetuses.

“There are all these products that marketers are telling you you need in order to make the baby welcome,” she said. “It’s part of the commodification of childhood.”

Typically, a pregnant woman would receive one, maybe two, ultrasounds, which use high-frequency sound waves to scan a woman’s abdomen and uterus to produce a sonogram, or image, of the fetus. The procedure is often performed in the first trimester to confirm a baby’s heartbeat and check for abnormalities.

Christiana Care’s Delaware Center for Maternal and Fetal Medicine offers 3-D and 4-D ultrasounds, but only as diagnostic tools, according to practice managing partner Anthony Sciscione, an obstetrician-gynecologist. In a 3-D ultrasound, you can see a baby’s chubby cheeks using specially designed probes and software. A 4-D ultrasound takes it several steps beyond, using a precise scanner to capture movements.

Under a doctor’s watch, such sophisticated technology also detect tumors, cleft palates and underdeveloped lungs, while ensuring the fetus receives a minimal amount of exposure, Sciscione said.

The Food and Drug Administration agrees. In late 2014, the federal agency criticized 3-D and 4-D ultrasounds used solely for entertainment, fetal keepsake videos and over-the-counter, handheld ultrasound devices for pregnant women to use at home.

“Ultrasound can heat tissues slightly and, in some cases, it can also produce very small bubbles (cavitation) in some tissues,” FDA biomedical engineer Shahram Vaezy said at the time.

The long-term effects of repeat exposure are unknown, which is why the FDA concluded that ultrasounds should be performed by certified technicians only when medically necessary.

A trained provider is particularly essential when an ultrasound detects a problem with the baby and the mother requires counseling, said Sciscione. His Newark practice only gives out heartbeat animals to patients at high risk of miscarriage.

“The family really treasures that,” he said. “That’s the memento of the pregnancy.”

In a society that has difficulty acknowledging the grieving process, marketers fill the gap with trinkets, Linn said. A Harvard Medical School lecturer, she worries that lavish ultrasound parties will lead to extravagant first birthday parties, sweet sixteens and weddings as parents try to one-up themselves.

Rivera, of My Baby’s Heartbeat Bear, says she doesn’t encourage clients to get additional ultrasounds to record a baby’s heartbeat. She markets her animals to obstetrics and gynecology offices and ultrasound studios, including three in Delaware.

Animals are priced $30 to $40 each and come fully stuffed with a fabric-fastened back and a heart-shaped recorder.

Surrounded by auto mechanics in a warehouse park, Rivera personally designs more than 20 animals in her lineup and enlists family members to stuff them, fluff them and ship them across the U.S. and to a half-dozen countries. Giraffes, elephants and lambs are her top sellers.

Julian Buller’s heartbeat swishes from a tiny lamb. Doctors initially told Patrice she had a less than five percent chance of getting pregnant with her first child.

“For us to get pregnant and keep the sound I never thought I would hear,” she said, trailing off.

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